From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,c4cb2c432feebd9d X-Google-Thread: 1094ba,c4cb2c432feebd9d X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,gid1094ba,public X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news2.google.com!news2.google.com!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!individual.net!not-for-mail From: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Jan_Vorbr=FCggen?= Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.fortran Subject: Re: Ada vs Fortran for scientific applications Date: Mon, 22 May 2006 09:41:15 +0200 Organization: MediaSec Technologies GmbH Message-ID: <4dd87pF18ot14U1@individual.net> References: <44715DED.5050906@cits1.stanford.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: individual.net Lp92fvLRX8Lc+x8Ncv8tqgr9vQLGYnMiLrclWA8HzRfKejAODS User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0 (Windows/20041206) X-Accept-Language: de-DE, de, en-us, en In-Reply-To: <44715DED.5050906@cits1.stanford.edu> Xref: g2news2.google.com comp.lang.ada:4327 comp.lang.fortran:10058 Date: 2006-05-22T09:41:15+02:00 List-Id: > Now, it is highly unlikely that the Ada language has anything in it that > will cause more than a few percentage points of difference in the > maximum theoretically-achievable speed. Thus, in practice any speed > differences are going to be almost entirely a factor of the quality of > the code you write, and the quality of the compiler you compile it on. That might be the case for Ada, but it's not clearly true for others. A language - any language, but in particular a computer or programming language - has both syntax and semantics. In trying to evaluate a language, people too often only look at the syntax - how can I express an operation I want executed? - instead of primarily the semantics - what in detail does "operation" mean here? -. If a language does not allow you to express cer- tain things that you know to be true about your operation, and that could be used to optimize the program, you are already at a disadvantage compared to a different language where that is not the case. As an example, look at the semantics of a DO loop and the apparantly equivalent FORALL statement in Fortran. Jan